Monday, November 12, 2012

Ready Player One

I'm reading Ready Player One and have reached the place where Wade mentions the recommended reading/watching list for all those seriously interested in finding a zillion dollar easter egg hidden by the deceased James Halliday witinn his created virtual world, the OASIS (p. 62) .....

**********

When it came to my research, I never took any shortcuts. Over the past five years, I'd worked my way down the entire recommended gunter reading list. Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, Neal Stephenson, Richard K. Morgan, Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Terry Pratchett, Terry Brooks, Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury, Joe Haldeman, Robert A. Heinlein, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jack Vance, William Gibson, Neil Gaiman, Bruce Sterling, Michael Moorcock, John Scalzi, Roger Zelazny. I read every novel by every single one of Halliday’s favorite authors.

And I didn’t stop there.

I also watched every single ﬁlm he referenced in the Almanac. If it was one of Halliday’s favorites, like WarGames, Ghostbusters, Real Genius, Bet-ter Off Dead, or Revenge of the Nerds, I rewatched it until I knew every scene by heart.

I devoured each of what Halliday referred to as “The Holy Trilogies”: Star Wars (original and prequel trilogies, in that order), Lord of the Rings,The Matrix, Mad Max, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones. (Halliday once said that he preferred to pretend the other Indiana Jones ﬁlms, from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull onward, didn’t exist. I tended to agree.)

I also absorbed the complete ﬁlmographies of each of his favorite directors. Cameron, Gilliam, Jackson, Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, DelToro, Tarantino. And, of course, Kevin Smith.

I spent three months studying every John Hughes teen movie andmemorizing all the key lines of dialogue.

Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive.

You could say I covered all the bases.

I studied Monty Python. And not just Holy Grail, either. Every single oneof their ﬁlms, albums, and books, and every episode of the original BBC series. (Including those two “lost” episodes they did for German television.)